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Last Topic's Ratings:
Batsugun - GGGGG - 100% (5) (1 SR)
Highway 2000 - GG - 100% (2) (1 SR)
Ochan no Oekaki Logic - GG - 100% (2)
Powerslave - GGGGGGG - 100% (7) (1 SR)
Skeleton Warriors - GAAB - 50% {4}
Worldwide Soccer 98 - GAA - 67% (3)
With 4 games rated at 100%, and 3 of them also getting SRs, I think this must have been the highest rated topic across the history of GAB. A fitting present for the holidays.
Games for this topic:
AnEarth Fantasy Stories: First Volume
Christmas Nights into Dreams
Cyber Speedway
D-Xhird
Pachi-Slot Kanzen Koryaku: Yunikore 97
Zap Snowboarding Trix 98
Speaking of the holidays, we also have Christmas Nights. With this topic falling on Christmas Day, I had to do it. I think some of the other games in the topic look pretty neat, too. Happy Holidays from GAB About Games.
AnEarth Fantasy Stories: First Volume - G
ReplyDeleteChristmas Nights into Dreams - G
Cyber Speedway - G
D-Xhird - B
Pachi-Slot Kanzen Koryaku: Yunikore 97 - A
Zap Snowboarding Trix 98 - A
AnEarth Fantasy Stories is a very interesting game that somewhat reminds me of Lunar, though it has a lot of unique ideas as well. For starters, the game has branching paths, but unlike pretty much every other game that ever did it, here the branch occurs at the very start of the game. The protagonist is left on the steps of a church at the beginning of the game, and several groups of people walk by. Depending on when you choose to cry, one of these groups will adopt you (if you don't cry at all, you get adopted by a nun at the church), which basically changes the entire game. Not only does the protagonist's class and abilities change based on this, it also significantly affects the plot and which party members end up joining you. I didn't even realize this was a thing at first, as I didn't know you could cry and got adopted by the nun, then got decently far before I read about this system. I was kind of incredulous it was even in the game, because the plot surrounding the church was so well fleshed-out it didn't seem like there could be an entire separate storyline (let alone 3 more!) but it is indeed the case and it's very cool. The game's presentation is also gorgeous, featuring some of the best spritework I've seen in a game from this era, and the story is very charming as well, with a ton of voice acting to boot. I guess you might complain that it does take a little while to get going (the time to the first battle is probably around an hour if you don't mash through the dialogue), but I was enjoying the story so I didn't mind too much. When you do finally get to the gameplay, it's also a little different from the norm. The battle system takes place on a 2D plane, similar to Lunar, with various attacks having different ranges. Something unique about this game is that there are no random battles and you don't level, all of the fights are scripted and as far as I can tell they don't respawn, instead your parameters grow based on the kinds of actions you take in battle, similar to the Saga series. Since there are limited fights and enemies don't drop money, you'll want to be pretty thorough about picking up items, particularly as this is also how you gain MP. Throughout the game, you can find Holix scattered everywhere. They come in 5 types, and varying amounts of each one are needed to cast spells. Each one you pick up increases your maximum MP of that type by 1, so you'll want to gather as many of them as possible, as even if the main character is not a spellcaster some of your allies will be. It's not a massive deal if you miss a couple things, though, the difficulty of the game seems fairly well-balanced. Overall, it seems like a very well-made game with great presentation, I'm surprised there's been no effort to translate this one yet. It just goes to show how badly Saturn got screwed by having so few of its games localized.
Christmas Nights is a difficult product to rate. It's essentially a Christmas-themed Nights demo disk which was given away by Sega as a little bonus. It consists of only 2 levels and one boss, plus a bunch of little extras that you can unlock after playing the game. In a certain sense, I think the setup that the game uses actually works pretty well, as the gameplay of Nights does lend itself well to a "score attack" style of play and the idea of unlocking little extras based on your performance is cool, it definitely helps give it a lot more replay value than it would have otherwise. That said, there's obviously still not a lot here, of course the gameplay of Nights is totally intact, but with only 2 stages you're probably not going to play it for that long. Still, I kind of like the idea behind the game, I feel like they were probably trying to make this into something of a "holiday tradition" among Saturn owners. I kind of wish they had maybe tossed in a Christmas themed Clockwork Knight stage to go along with it, as I think that game also easily would have fit the theme, but it's still a nifty little Christmas present from Sega anyway.
DeleteCyber Speedway is a pretty cool game. The game is a futuristic racer, though it's far more along the lines of F-Zero than Wipeout, with very generous arcade-style physics. One unique feature about the game is that it has a story mode with voice acting. The story is very simple, and there isn't a lot beyond the enemy racers taunting you before each race and your mechanic giving you some tips for the course ahead, but it's still kind of fun anyway (I wish your defeated opponents spoke again after you beat them, but sadly they don't). The game's physics, as noted, are quite generous, you aren't penalized much for hitting walls or bumping into other cars, though you do have a kind of boost turn you can use by tapping the gas that works fairly well and to get first on some tracks you'll need to learn it. The track design is also pretty good, pretty much every track has some kind of unique twist to it, and there are 10 total, which is not a bad amount for such an early game. Oh, another funny little detail is that the game has a different soundtrack in Japan and Europe compared to the US. It has a very standard hard rock chiptune OST outside of the US, but the US version replaces this with a licensed rock soundtrack that doesn't really fit the game, but perhaps it enhances its quirky charm to some degree. There's a little slowdown here and there and I can see how some people might complain about the game being short or not being terribly challenging, but it's also easily one of the strongest early racers from the era which I would easily take over the first Wipeout.
D-Xhird is not the absolute worst 3D fighter I've ever played but it's still probably B. Like many similar games, this is a string-based game with a handful of special moves, but there's no cancelling so offense is extremely limited and predictable. One of the game's biggest issues has to do with its controls. Many moves have totally nonsensical inputs (frequently involving double button inputs for no reason whatsoever) and even the moves with somewhat normal inputs very rarely come out because the game's input detection is one of the worst in any game. As with many similar games, there are almost no good ways to get significant damage from a low, so stand blocking shuts down almost all offense (oh, and of course, you have to block with a button). There is a guard meter, but special moves are so slow and unreliable that you can easily sidestep them on reaction and punish. I do appreciate that the game has a practice mode that shows the movelists and the presentation of the game isn't awful, but it needed a lot more polishing.
I expected Pachi-Slot Kanzen Koryaku was going to be another bog-standard Pachinko game, but it turns out it's actually a collection of standard slot machines instead. What separates this from regular slot machines, apparently, is that these machines feature a bonus mode (similar to Pachinko Machines) where the odds of getting high payouts become much better. While I only marginally understand how such modes work in Pachinko, it's far more straightforward here, generally all you have to do is make one good match to enter the bonus mode (ie, get 777 or some other special symbol). The game even provides a mode that makes this easier to achieve so you can learn how the bonus mode works. There's also an interesting overlay you can call up that shows the reels and the current position on them with a cursor (you have to press a button to stop the reels), which lets you see how rigged it is against you (it shows exactly where you hit the button and where it actually stopped), but you can presumably use this information to get a higher chance of actually getting a match. Interestingly, when you're in bonus mode, the game actually rigs thing in your favour instead, making it easy to get a ton of low-value matches in a row. There's not too much more to say about it, the machines in the game are all fairly similar and there's not a ton of depth, but it is a little bit more interesting than most slot machines tend to be.
DeleteZap Snowboarding Trix 98 is a big step up from the first game, though it still has a fair bit of jank. For starters, they actually did address most of the issues from the first game. Instead of having only 3 tracks and one race type, there's now a series of many races spanning several different types of events, like Race, Slopestyle and Slalom. They've also addressed the lack of tricks, as most races now gauge you on your trick score. Like in the early Coolboarders games, you can only do tricks at predefined spots, and the controls for them are pretty weird. To do tricks, you first have to tuck, which is bizarrely mapped to down on the dpad. You can use L and R wind up spins (these have to be inputted while holding down), then press C to jump, then use a direction + A to do grab tricks, then let go before you land. If that sounds kind of awkward it's because it is, you certainly can learn it, but it doesn't feel very intuitive, particularly since you can't turn while tucking, so if you ever press, say, down + right (which does a hard turn in most snowboarding games), prepare to crash into a wall since you will simply tuck. You can power turn in this game, it's mapped to L and R, and it does work pretty well once you get used to it, though the Slalom events are still a nightmare (I don't believe getting all the gates is even possible) and some of the stages are weirdly slow. Overall, it's probably about comparable to Cool Boarders 2, but there are much better snowboarding games this generation.